They were playing hide-and-seek with bicycle lamps after tea. Dan had hung his lamp on the apple tree at the end of the hellebore bed in the walled garden, and was crouched by the gooseberry bushes ready to dash off when Una should spy him. He saw her lamp come into the garden and disappear as she hid it under her cloak. While he listened for her footsteps, somebody (they both thought it was Phillips the gardener) coughed in the corner of the herb-beds. ‘All right,’ Una shouted across the asparagus; ‘we aren’t hurting your old beds, Phippsey!’ She flashed her lantern towards the spot, and in its circle of light they saw a Guy Fawkes-looking man in a black cloak and a steeple-crowned hat, walking down the path beside Puck. They ran to meet him, and the man said something to them about rooms in their head. After a time they understood he was warning them not to catch colds. ‘You’ve a bit of a cold yourself, haven’t you?’ said Una, for he ended all his sentences with a consequential cough. Puck laughed. ‘Child,’ the man answered, ‘if it hath pleased Heaven to afflict me with an infirmity--’ ‘Nay, nay,’ Puck struck In, ‘the maid spoke out of kindness. I know that half your cough is but a catch to trick the vulgar; and that’s a pity. There’s honesty enough in you, Nick, without rasping and hawking.’ ‘Good people’--the man shrugged his lean shoulders--‘the vulgar crowd love not truth unadorned. Wherefore we philosophers must needs dress her to catch their eye or--ahem!---their ear.’ ‘And what d’you think of that?’ said Puck solemnly to Dan. ‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘It sounds like lessons.’ ‘Ah--well! There have been worse men than Nick Culpeper to take lessons from. Now, where can we sit that’s not indoors?’ ‘In the hay-mow, next to old Middenboro,’ Dan suggested. ‘He doesn’t mind.’ ‘Eh?’ Mr Culpeper was stooping over the pale hellebore blooms by the light of Una’s lamp. ‘Does Master Middenboro need my poor services, then?’ ‘Save him, no!’ said Puck. ‘He is but a horse--next door to an ass, as you’ll see presently. Come!’ Their shadows jumped and slid on the fruit-tree walls. They filed out of the garden by the snoring pig-pound and the crooning hen-house, to the shed where Middenboro the old lawn-mower pony lives. His friendly eyes showed green in the light as they set their lamps down on the chickens’ drinking-trough outside, and pushed past to the hay-mow. Mr Culpeper stooped at the door. ‘Mind where you lie,’ said Dan. ‘This hay’s full of hedge-brishings. ‘In! in!’ said Puck. ‘You’ve lain in fouler places than this, Nick. Ah! Let us keep touch with the stars!’ He kicked open the top of the half-door, and pointed to the clear sky. ‘There be the planets you conjure with! What does your wisdom make of that wandering and variable star behind those apple boughs?’ The children smiled. A bicycle that they knew well was being walked down the steep lane. ‘Where?’ Mr Culpeper leaned forward quickly. ‘That? Some countryman’s lantern.’